Blog Experience

Hi Group,

I wanted to end this semester with a brief view towards the blogging experience. This is the second course inwhich I had to maintain a blog. I feel that it offers alot of potential for the exchange of ideas between students. This will allow them to interact more with each other and inturn feel more comfortable to interact with the instructor.

My main goal is to increase comprehension by increasing interaction. Blogging appears to have the ability to accomplish this goal. I will have to decide how to include this in my sections next fall.

I thank all of you for an interesting semester and I look forward to working with you again in the Ed. Tech. program.

Best wishes,

Ken

Sound instruction

Hi Group,

I found this article: Instructor-student Interaction by Juan Jose Gutierrez, http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/MAR00_Issue/Instructorstudent.htm and wanted to discuss two lines from it. In the article, Gutierrez stated that “when the dust of the rush for the new cybernetic horizon settles we will understand that traditional instructors have been right all along: it is not the new technologies but the basic principles of good practice what make learning occur. In the computer mediated instructional environment, only those programs where the basic characteristics of sound teaching, learning and assessment are applied will stand firm”

We have spent the past seven weeks discussing the roles and uses of new technologies in our classrooms but we must remember what we are there for. Technology is a tool that can increase the learning experience if used effectively. However, technology cannot replace poor instruction. I hope that administrators remember this when evaluating us in the classroom.

I thought that this was a great quote to use as the semester draws to a close to remind us to blend the ideas together.

Thanks,

Ken

Action Research

Hi Group,

Today I was going to talk about an article I found: "Improving Teacher-Student Interaction in the EFL CLassroom: An Action Research Report" http://iteslj.org/Articles/Snell-Interaction.html

However, I've decided to talk about action research. I had a class from another university on action research and I must admit that I liked the process for improvement. Action research allows the educator to take an active role in the improvement of thier own classroom. In the process, you select an issue that you want to address, you conduct a literature review, propose a method of experimentation and data gathering. Finally, you review the data and determine the effectiveness of your experience.

It is a great process because it is centered around you and your classroom. You can make it as grand or as small as you feel comfortable with. In the end, you are able to generate a report to give to your administration to show that you have been active towards improvement. I would suggest that everyone try it atleast once and go from there. As we talk about increasing the use of technology in our classroom, we can use it to gater evidence to support our statements.

Ken

Technology & Fear

Hi Group,

To wrap this week up, I was thinking about our assignment for next week - the movies. As I debated on the movie to discuss, I was starting to think about people and their fear towards new technology. How or when do we become afraid of technology. Does it require a bad experience or possibly your upbringing to be afraid of something? In terms of technology, the sci-fi movies over the years have shown "good" technology about as often as "bad" technology. We have seen plenty of friendly robots versus bad just like nice versus evil computers.

So why are people reluctant to use technology? I guess we are all afraid of the unknown to some extent. Maybe we don't want to look foolish infront of others. I guess the reason why I am bringing this up is that this is an area that we must all look into. If we can ease not only the fears of our students but our own as well, then we may truly incorporate technology into the classroom.

Thanks for your input in this area,

Ken

Student survey

Hi Group,

I was looking for more articles on student-teacher interactions and I came across this one: “Student-teacher interactions and better science teachers”: http://www.iier.org.au/qjer/qjer18/waldrip.html

I thought that this was an interesting article because I want to increase interaction so comprehension can increase but this article looked at interaction from the student’s perspective. The article discussed a survey, the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (OTI), that was administered to secondary students.

Overall, the found that “better teachers could be identified through the perceptions of their students on the scales of the QTI. The better teachers could be identified as those whose students' perceptions were more than one standard deviation above the mean on the scales of Leadership, Helping/Friendly, and Understanding and more than one standard deviation below the mean on the Uncertainty, Dissatisfied and Admonishing scales.”

This survey/ article does add to one of my postings from last week that personality is important in the classroom. A teacher must be a positive type of person to help promote interaction. I remember a few of my instructors in college who carried that “tough, better than you attitude” into the classroom. That was the last person I would ever ask for help. Now that we are on that side of the podium, we must be better than them.

Ken

The Media Equation

Hi Group,

I just finished reading chapter 1 of "The Media Equation" by Reeves (1996). In it, the author wrote about medai equaling real life and how humans fail to make the seperation. The first thought that came to mind was watching too many Star Trek episodes. In the show, and in many other sci-fis, there is a "friendly-voiced" computer that the star interacts with to solve problems like you would do with a friend. I feel that we have been conditioned over the years to act like this towards media. On the show Knight Rider, the talking car wass the best friend of the star.

Another thing that came to mind was our increased interaction with media while real personal interaction has dropped. People spend more time with thier computers than they do with real people. Emails, for example, are forms of communication but it seems to be more with the computer than with someone on the other end.

I wanted to point these two ideas out because the author discussed the idea of the "old brain" in the modern world. As we evolved, we had constant interaction with others but that has been drastically reduced in less than 50 years. Too quick for our old minds to evolve with.

Just some ideas,

Ken

Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass. 1996. "Ch 1, The Media Equation," pp. 3-18 in The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press.

Down hill side

Hi everyone,

I was just thinking about this semester because we are now on the downhill side of the course. I must admit that I have learned alot from all of you by reading your blogs. I wasn't sure on how effective this was going to be but I must change my opinion. No matter the area of concentration, its great to see teachers who are still excited about their career and want to learn more to become a better teacher. I have seen too many who are now in the "I love my summers off" mode.

I have four courses remaining in this program before my oncampus visits and in that time I hope to find some online chat rooms or postings that I can participate in. Exchanging ideas between subjects as well as geographic regions keep one fresh in their are. So, my question for the week: Has anyone for discussion boards outside of U.F. that they will continue to participate in??

Thanks and have a nice weekend,
Ken

Online Student Interaction

Hi group,

Today, I found an article on the web titled: Software for Online Student Interaction, http://www.stanford.edu/~marcelo/Teaching/Papers/SoftwareforOnlineStudentInteraction.pdf

It was an interesting article about the use of online instruction for economics at Stanford University. Essentialy it had two main components. The first looked at the issue of office hours and the student. They made several suggestions but the two that I thought were interesting was the use of a white board by the professor so he/ she could draw graphs, etc. and send them to the student while working in a chatroom. This would supplement the text discussion going on. The other was the idea of connecting a webcam so students could watch and interact with traditional oncampus students as they entered the office. They could listen to the questions and submit followup if desired. However, the camera would be turned off if private issues were being discussed. Both techniques would allow distance students to interact more like traditional students.

The other area discussed in the paper was the adaptation of classroom experiments for online use. The online biology classes at my school are only hybrids - the students must come on campus every two weeks for the lab component. However, it would be interesting to see if some of our labs could be modified to reduce this requirement. One area I think that I will look into is the use of case studies or webquests. I just have to find items that are level appropriate for my students.

Thanks,
Ken

Ten tips for improving relationships

Hi group,

I was doing an article search and I came across the following article: Morganett, L. (1995) Ten tips for improving student-teacher relationships. Social Education. Jan. v59, p.27-29.

The reason why I bring this article up is that fact that it is so simple. I am trying to use technology to increase interaction but I must remember the basics before I move on to the advanced.

One of the tips is the idea that teachers should encourage students to ask questions and for teachers to instruct with a positive frame of mind. The first may be easy to accomplish online, I wonder about the second. I guess we must think about our word selection and the context of our sentences. We must be clear on our meanings so students online will not misinterpret them. The author also wrote about taking an interest in the students outside of the classroom. This is hard enough at the community college level where I see some students for five hours, one night a week but how can we do this online?? The author feels that this increasedd interaction will allow the instructor to obtain a better understanding of the socio-economical background of the student. In an online class, the student could post whatever they want so this may not benefit the instructor.

Finally, the author stated that the rate and types of questions would increase once the students feel that the instructor is impartial and is truly concerned about their learning. I do agree with this statement, no matter where the learning is occurring (in a classroom or online). A positive attitude and a sense of concern should generate an openness no matter where the students are located.

Thanks,
Ken